By Clay Wirestone | opinion editor
Good morning! This Sunday, make sure that someone close knows just how much they mean to you. That’s right, I’m pulling out an old cliche — because life moves fast, and you never know when you might get another opportunity to say how you feel. And hey, I’m thankful for all of our morning newsletter readers!
Max McCoy / Kansas Reflector
OPINION
May is peak tornado season. Here’s to the chasers who bring us the ‘ground truth’ of deadly storms.
By Max McCoy
Something told Lanny Dean to hit the brakes.
The battered Honda CR-V skidded to a stop on the wet black pavement of U.S. 183, its array of antennas quivering. The anemometer poking above the roof was twirling madly, driven by the 50-mph rush of air being sucked into a massive, wedge-shaped tornado less than a mile ahead. As Dean watched, the twister crossed the highway and began chewing up an electrical substation at the southwestern edge of Greensburg, Kansas.
Ordinarily, Dean — then an athletic 33-year-old weather buff who had been pursued and caught by more storms than anybody else in the adrenalin-drunk world of storm chasers — would have stood on the accelerator and kept the twister a few hundred yards off his right front fender.
He’d done just that hundreds of times, while shooting video and downloading weather data to his laptop and phoning in reports. He’d been on the air with meteorologist Jay Prater at KAKE in Wichita that night, warning the audience to take cover now, good advice that Dean never seemed to follow himself. The roof of the CR-V, in fact, was still crumpled from an encounter he’d had two years before in the tiny community of Fowler, not far up the road from Greensburg. A twister had picked up the Honda and left it spinning on its top, with the windows blown out and Dean strapped upside-down in the driver’s seat.
Fowler had been a small tornado, a writhing dirty white snake, EF1 or maybe EF2 on the Fujita. The adventure had gotten Dean scrapes and bruises and an Emmy nomination, because his video camera had never stopped running.
This one was something different.
Minnesota Reformer
Immigration street sweeps led to more ‘collateral’ arrests of noncriminals
A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights.
Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may be tamping down the large-scale sweeps that foster them, but tens of thousands were arrested this way between August and early March.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Kansas Reflector staff will participate in the following free public forums.
7 p.m. May 11, Books & Brews, Riverbank Brewing in Council Grove. Hosts: Flint Hills Books and Riverbank Brewing.
6:30 p.m. June 12, Kansas Museum of History in Topeka. Opinion editor Clay Wirestone will join a panel discussion: "From the Desk of William Allen White: What Can Journalism Today Learn from the Sage of Emporia?"
7 p.m. June 27, Park City Senior Center. Host: Park City Community Pride.
2 p.m. Sept. 27, Red Rocks Visitor Center in Emporia. Host: Red Rocks.
If you're interested in having us talk in your town, email Sherman Smith at [email protected].
Thanks for reading Read & Reflect. Did you know our weekend digest is also free? Sign up here. And if you enjoyed today’s edition, please forward to a friend. Increasing our readership helps us cover more news.